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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

8600 channels? Wouldn't that overwhelm you? I'm trying to think up scenarios where an org would need so many, but I can't. Is this normal?

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You're not going to be even aware of the majority of the channels. In my experience having ~1.5 channels per employee sounds right across the company. I've started channels for: specific incidents, personal huddle, lunchtime game organisation, limited notifications target, etc. Also we don't know if they count archived channels or not.

Yep, same here. I create many topical channels to discuss some narrow-ish topic and archive them after the matter is concluded. Some of those channels just live a few days or even just hours - other live for several weeks but with several days of silence in-between messages. If I need to look something up I can grab the channel from the archive and won't have messages for unrelated topics in-between.

There's probably a support channel for each customer and agents tasked with floating amongst them.

Channel sprawl is very normal. While my day job has a broad scope in the org, I’m a “member” of over 900 MS Teams. I’d guess that 3% are active and i interact with 0.

At a previous job a new slack channel was spun up for every incident, no matter how minor by automation. So yeah a few thousand doesn't sound that weird to me.

900 teams? That's a lot, are you sure you don't mean 900 channels (or whatever Teams calls them) instead?

A lot of people want to have full control so rather than create a channel called "Project Phoenix" in a team called "Operations" they'll create a whole new team, and use the general channel.

Much like the OP here I'm in hundreds of teams, and almost all of them do all their talking in #general and they wonder why people never respond to notifications.

The Teams UX and general paradigm is awful. Right now I'm in 3 group chats and two channels (in two Teams) discussing the Okta incident. Huge overlap of them, but not 100% so some people aren't getting all the information.

I forgot to mention that the teams interface is truly awful. I do what I should be doing in a “Team” in one of a half dozen pinned group adhoc chats.

The context switch between a mostly useless teams tab and a needlessly full screen IM window is too heavy for me.

Nope. 900 teams.

Somewhere, there’s some project manager that says “Wow, I bet spooky23 would love to know about my spreadsheet sorting project”.

I suspect lots of small channels with only a few people in them. They have 5k employees, it adds up.

#Tom

#Dick

#Harry

You jest, but the last two companies have been at have had channels named like "Steves" for all the Steves in the company.

Support tickets, or incidents, or escalations might require creating a new slack channel

It's not a bad idea to create channels for incidents. Ever tried to keep an incident timeline in a Jira ticket? It's absolutely horrendous. We used to automatically create a slack channel whenever a Jira incident ticket was created, and post it into the engineering channel with a message like "SEV1 incident, please join channel #INCIDENT-21". Slack is real nice for posting graphs, links, screenshots, going off on different investigation threads, pinning a status that gets constantly updated, calling out for people to join the channel using @you-hoo and running automations using bots. Jira absolutely sucks for live incident handling.

Of course, you still wouldn't have 8500 channels. That's a lot of incidents.

Ever tried to keep an incident timeline in a Jira ticket?

Once.

Thanks for bringing back the nightmares, friend.

They have access to that many channels. There's likely many that are public (including history), but the user is not a member.

We have 70k channels in our slack at my current company. A large portion are deserted.

This blew my mind as well

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